Downtown Brooklyn will get a new LGBTQ clinic

The Callen-Lorde Community Health Center has signed a 20-year lease in Brooklyn that will allow it to expand its health services to the LGBTQ community in 2019, the nonprofit said Thursday.

The 25,000 square foot space at 40 Flatbush Avenue Extension in downtown Brooklyn will be the organization's first health center in the borough. Currently, about 30% of its patients travel from Brooklyn to their clinics in the Bronx and Manhattan, said Wendy Stark, executive director of Callen-Lorde.

"LGBTQ communities are in dire need of competent health care services, and we see proof of that every day in the numbers of callers we have," she said. "We've expanded our capacity to the outer limits."

For example, the Bronx clinic, which opened in July 2016, currently has a waiting list for appointments stretching until early summer, she said.

The decision to locate in Downtown Brooklyn came from a 2014 survey of their patients and other people in the LGBTQ community. Callen-Lorde is known for providing health services to the transgender community and people with HIV, who often feel uncomfortable seeking health care because of stigma and insensitivity on the part of health care providers. About half of all patients receive some sort of government subsidy.

The expansion project is expected to cost about $10.5 million, with $2.5 million coming from a DSRIP capital award announced in March 2016, Stark said.

When the project is completed in mid-2019, the new clinic will be able to accommodate a roster of about 10,000 new patients.

The lease for the new space was negotiated by Carri Lyon, executive managing director and co-head of Cushman & Wakefield’s National Not-for-Profit Practice Group and Mitzi Flexer, a director at Cushman & Wakefield, with a price around $40 a square foot, the real estate firm said.

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